Switching two nights around or combining two nights into one, which Steinbeck also did later in “Charley,” are petty literary crimes in a nonfiction book. So is inventing a character – or two. So is creating a composite character from two real people. Honest journalists never want to see facts fiddled with for any reason. But fudging reality for the sake of drama is not rare and it’s not new. It’s been done forever in movies and TV shows about real people and real places. And it’s been done in nonfiction books since they were invented.
Most of the time these fictional tricks don’t matter. But at some point they can squeeze reality and truth from a nonfiction book, leaving readers deceived or forced to guess which “facts” to believe and which to discount. And at some point “literary fraud” can escalate into charges of actual legal fraud. That’s what happened with the “creative fabrications” in “Three Cups of Tea.”
The mega-seller by Greg Mortenson was touted by its publisher, Penguin Group, as the true story “of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard.” Mortenson sold nearly 5 million books, raised more than $60 million for his charity work in the remote mountains of Pakistan, passed himself off as a living saint, won nonfiction awards and became a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.
When “Three Cups of Tea” became a nonfiction bestseller in 2007, no one raised doubts about its veracity. It wasn’t until 2011 when “60 Minutes” and other journalists fact-checked “Three Cups of Tea” – and traveled to remotest Pakistan – that Mortenson and his self-serving lies were exposed.
In “Three Cups of Deceit,” author Jon Krakauer, a former supporter of Mortenson, did the most thorough job of discrediting the “nonfiction” book, charging that “Three Cups of Tea’s” first eight chapters “are an intricately wrought work of fiction presented as fact.” He also says “Mortenson has lied about the noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met, the number of schools he has built.” Otherwise, it was a true book.
Mortenson’s fabrications did not only get him accused of literary fraud. Two class-action suits also were filed against him, co-author David Relin, Penguin Group and Mortenson’s charity, Central Asia Institute. Some readers claimed they were bilked of $15 because they thought they were buying a nonfiction book and they weren’t. And some donors who said they were duped by Mortenson's book and his fund-raising speeches charged him and his charity with “fraud, deceit, breach of contract, RICO [racketeering and corrupt organization] violations, unjust enrichment and constructive trust.”
Both lawsuits were dismissed, but Mortenson proved that “imaginative” nonfiction still pays big dividends for the authors that abuse it and the publishing houses that don’t question it. It’s also an indictment of the book-reviewing industry that no one questioned Mortenson’s yarn. Or noticed, as Krakauer pointed out, that Mortenson described in detail how he went to a church in Calcutta in 2000 and knelt, alone, beside the body of his heroine Mother Teresa – who had actually died in 1997.
But exposing Mortenson didn’t seem to matter to his publisher, the Penguin Group. A year after his story was discredited, Penguin – which conveniently argued that it was not its legal responsibility to check the veracity of its nonfiction books – was still hawking “Three Cups of Tea” on its web site as a work of nonfiction with words of high praise from Tom Brokaw, People magazine and the Washington Post. The introduction to Penguin’s reading guide for book clubs still called Mortenson’s fairytale “the true story of one of the most extraordinary humanitarian missions of our time.”
Vive la Potato Country
Cruising U.S. Route 1, taking for granted the beautiful bright morning and the fall colors of Aroostook County, I wasn’t thinking about fact-checking Steinbeck. I was hoping to see a big potato farm – or big potato factory – or big whatever it is that potatoes come from these days. I never did.
I did notice something else. Nothing I had passed since Deer Isle was in the process of being built or was obviously newish. No new houses. No new malls or crossroads or new chain restaurants that didn’t start with “Mc” or “Sub.” But then came the river town of Madawaska.
A metropolis by upper Maine standards, with 4,035 people, and proud to be the northernmost town in New England, Madawaska sits on U.S. Highway 1 on the American side of the St. John River. Leaving its business district I saw something I hadn’t seen in 1,000 miles – a serious construction site with heavy construction equipment. Steinbeck noted a similar lack of newness on his loop through New England. He passed through villages he said hadn’t changed in 100 years except for the paved roads and traffic. Half a century later, that was still true.
The previous night I had decided to behave like an adult and get myself a motel room. Since the alleged homogenization of America by national chains isn’t happening in Maine north of Bangor, finding lodging was like it was in 1960. It was either risk a Bates Motel or spend another night in the Red RAV4 Inn. I threw the dice and used my cell phone and Hotwire.com to find the Aroostook Hospitality Inn in Van Buren, aka “Gateway to the St. John Valley and Canada.” The town of 2,171 is stretched along the St. John River across from Canada and was named after President Martin Van Buren.
According to Wikipedia, 76.6 per cent of its citizens “are habitual speakers of French.” I would have never suspected that disturbing fact from my overnight stay, but I trust homeland security forces in Washington are aware French Canadians are quietly colonizing the top edge of Maine. Lower America will know it’s too late when Van Buren votes to change its name to De Gaulle.
The motel in Van Buren, pricy at $69, was a mom & pop of 1960s vintage with lots of un-corporate character. But it came with all the important amenities the modern Steinbeck ghost-chaser needs – strong Wi-Fi, plenty of 3-pronged wall plugs and an endless hot shower.
After 2,400 miles tracing the edge of the East Coast all the way from Key West, U.S. Highway 1 evaporates without fanfare in the town of Fort Kent. As Steinbeck did, when Route 1 vanished I turned south on state Route 11 for the long haul back to New Hampshire and the way West.
Before I left Fort Kent, I suffered a shock that made me realize what a strange, atypical part of America I had been traveling through. It happened when I saw a black college student on the street. She was the first non-white person I could remember seeing since a pizza shop in downtown Northampton.
The 2010 Census tells the statistical tale. The previous three states I had been in – Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine – might be full of color in the fall, but year round their lilywhite populations don’t look like much of the rest of the country. Each had black populations of about 1 percent. The national percentage was 12.6 percent. The same lack of color would be true for other long stretches of the Steinbeck Highway.
Route Without End
For some reason – maybe because Steinbeck said little about the road itself – I dreaded Route 11. On the map it goes straight through the middle of nowhere to nowhere. I had imagined running all day long through solid pine trees over a marshy flatland, crashing into a moose or two or being crushed like a fly on the grill of a logging truck.
In reality Maine's longest highway was prettier, far more interesting and more enjoyable than foggy, flat U.S. 1 was on the Atlantic coast – until the sun set anyway. Route 11’s two lanes raced over, around, up, down and through the hills and low mountains in deepest, darkest, woodsiest, least-populated Maine. There was virtually no traffic. No reason to go slower than 65.
Taking photos through my windshield of the green-red-orange-yellow forests and oncoming logging trucks, I began to suspect the wide, pristine highway was built either just to prove how unbelievably empty the middle of Maine was or to give logging trucks their private speedway. Other cars were as rare as houses, farms and towns. Wallagrass, Eagle Lake and Winterville were towns. So was Portage, which along with 390 humans had its own lake in the middle of town, a municipal seaplane base and, if I did
the math right, 1 resident who was not a Caucasian.
Steinbeck apparently saw more moose along state Route 11 than I saw people. The only moose I saw were silhouetted on warning signs. But I flew past things for sale that Steinbeck didn’t see and probably would have decried as evidence of the materialism of spoiled Americans if he had. Snowmobiles, including four Arctic Cats still in shipping crates, were the most common outdoor toys for sale along the highway. But I could have bought a shed, a boat, a motorcycle or a refrigerator and had my pick of several pickups, farm tractors and riding mowers.
No one guarded these items, just as no one guarded the roadside pumpkin and firewood stands of Vermont and New Hampshire. Theft was deterred by the basic honesty of rural folks and the heavy weaponry they all owned, plus the self-policing logic of low-population density and geography. Tourists zipping by were too spooked by the wilderness to slow down and shop, much less steal. And if any locals swiped something of their neighbors’ from the roadside, they’d have to go to another time zone to use it or sell it to avoid being caught.
Route 11 took me longer than it should have. The weather and scenery were too fine to ignore. I pulled over a dozen times to take photos of sagging abandoned farm houses, long stretches of lonesome highway or the cute little rest stops that MaineDOT has cut into the pine and hardwood jungle.
The rustic “waysides” provide more than quiet places for picnics or nature calls. When it dawned on me that I might not find a restaurant for a day or two, I pulled into a rest area to scarf down some peanut butter and crackers. Greeting me were three empty parked vehicles and one person smoking a cigarette at a picnic table. After 10 minutes the mystery of the missing two drivers was solved when a middle-aged man and woman emerged from the flaming woods, went directly to their respective pickup trucks and drove off in different directions. Further proof of central Maine’s chronic motel shortage.
On I drove. Peter Breslow, the NPR producer, called and we set up a time for Scott Simon to interview me the next day when I’d be in Lancaster, New Hampshire. I had my first face-to-face encounter with a human on state Route 11 when I drove through the sad little burg of Patten. I had doubled back to photograph a bush-choked old house on Main Street that was obviously inhabited when Steinbeck hurried by 50 years ago. As I got out of my car, a young woman stopped, rolled her passenger window down and asked if I needed any help. She thought I was lost, which it looked like I was. But I was just driving as if traffic laws didn't apply to journalists. When I told her I was chasing Steinbeck, she gave me a quick history of her town of 1,200 mid-Mainers.
The future didn’t sound too promising for Patten. It owed its existence to the lumber boom of the 1800s and still relied on forestry, hunting, fishing and the wood products industries for a disproportionate share of its jobs. Before the woman drove off she suggested I take a picture of the Patten General Store down the road. “Why?” I asked. "Because it's going to be torn down tomorrow."
She wasn't the first woman in timeless/spaceless/changeless Maine to think I was a helpless man in distress. She was the fourth in less than 24 hours. The first time was in Calais. After I had left Karen's Main Street diner and the Calais Book Shop, I stopped by the side of the road on my way out of town to write what I thought would be a quick blog item.
It was a pleasant spot by the St. Croix River, but mainly I wanted to take advantage of the sudden surge in Verizon's cell phone signal. (Three weeks later, when my wife got our bill, I’d learn the strong signal had been coming from across the river in Canada. Two days of cross-border roaming charges in upper Maine would cost $900. In Billings, Montana, I’d waste an afternoon at a Verizon store getting the charges reduced to zero.)
I wrote a blog entry about Calais and its people while sitting in the driver’s position, but because my laptop was on my "bed" in the back I had to twist around between the front seats to type. Because I am journalism's slowest writer, the blog, which was really more like a long newspaper feature story, took almost two hours to write.
The first visitor was a U.S. Customs and Border Control officer, who pulled up behind me in her patrol car. She had passed me three times and seen me in the same strange position, so she naturally thought I had a heart attack or had been the victim of a Canadian mob hit. Apologizing as abjectly as possible, I assured her I was fine and explained what I was doing. She was as sweet as any police person could legally be and with a smile left me to my pathetic, contorted typing.
Ten minutes later, I looked up from my keyboard to see two cars parked behind my RAV4 and a pair of women with worried faces hurrying toward me. They too thought I was dead or dying and were genuinely relieved, and not the least bit annoyed, to be told I was physically fine, just mentally challenged. I finally drove across the road to a parking lot, feeling like a jerk.
Maine people – Mainers? Manians? Mainsters? – of both sexes couldn't have been more pleasant and they obviously had been brought up to be kind to strangers. But it was comforting to know the good women of The Pine/Potato State were looking out for me. I’d meet dozens of other women on my trip who were unnecessarily sweet or went out of their way to help me – waitresses, motel managers, county government officials, mothers at home. Whether they were just doing their job or answering my fool questions when I appeared unannounced at their front door, not a one was sour or unfriendly or even wary. When you are old and scraggly and alone, as I was, you’re an object of pity and a threat to no one.
Destination Milo
The Aroostook County line finally appeared, but Route 11 refused to end. I watched a protracted sunset from a hilltop and small-talked to two overly serious photographers from Montreal who had set up their tripods in the tall grass to capture the glorious panorama.
The middle of Maine feels even emptier when the sun is gone. It was dark when I pulled into Millinocket, the lumber mill town where the Pelletier family of "American Loggers" fame lived. After a surprisingly good spinach salad and a beer at Pelletier’s crowded family restaurant/bar, I drove into the black night for the next major town, Milo. In the dark I covered a distance of 39 miles to Milo, but the road I traveled could have been a high-speed treadmill in a tunnel. As far I could tell, except for Brownville Junction, it was deep forest all the way. I took photos of the twisting road ahead as I chased its white lines at 60 mph, straddling the centerline through a narrow channel of trees.
A few mailboxes flashed by, a house with no lights, maybe a river. My Sirius XM radio, cranked up extra-loud with jazz, cut in and out because of the terrain or overhanging trees, I didn’t know which. I met my third car after 17 miles. In 45 minutes I counted 12. Steinbeck, who slept overnight in his camper shell by a bridge somewhere along Route 11, traveled the same lonely desolate way, but probably in daylight, when the local moose population would have been awake. Maine has 30,000 moose but I didn’t run into one.
I passed through downtown Milo, a town of 2,400 in the dead center of Maine. Once a thriving railroad repair facility for all of New England, Milo earned its Wiki-immortality in 1923 when 75 members of the Ku Klux Klan sullied the town’s Labor Day parade by holding its first daylight march in the United States. South of town I stopped for gas at the C&J Variety store. A true variety store, it carried booze, paperback books, pizza, live bait and Milo hoodies. Out front it even had a public pay phone, something Steinbeck would have appreciated if C&J Variety hadn’t been a Studebaker dealership or whatever it was in 1960.
“Did you ever hear of John Steinbeck?” I asked the 20-something girl behind the counter when she came outside for a smoke.
“I don’t think he lives around here,” she said.
Too tired to laugh, I held my smart-ass tongue. I provided her with some context.
“He’s the author of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and ‘Of Mice and Men.’ Did you ever have to read them in high school?”
Her face brightened. “Now that you say it, I’ve heard the name. I thought you were asking me if he lived around here.” She wasn’t
the last person, young and old, who would not recognize John Steinbeck’s name until I also mentioned his two most famous books, which most high school kids in America still read – or at least are still assigned.
I’ll never know how close I was to a motel when I gave up. I drove another 70 or 80 miles south of Milo, trusting my GPS Person to figure out the best way to get from endless state Route 11 to U.S. Highway 2. My notebook from that night faded into scribbles and went blank. “Dover has a McDonald’s …. Guilford, no business district….” For an hour I looked for a decent turnout or rest stop. On a long grade on U.S. Route 2, somewhere east of Farmington, Maine, I flew past a poorly lighted used car dealership sitting by itself. I hit the brakes hard, backed onto the grassy lot and parked at the end of a row of vehicles. With the nose of my RAV4 pointed at the road, I locked myself in, cracked my sunroof, installed my blackout curtains and instantly fell asleep.
Impersonating a used car worked flawlessly. Even with its cargo carrier, my RAV4 blended in with the 30 or 40 other vehicles parked on the lot. Trucks and cars and the local law hurrying by in the night took no notice. Up at 4:50, by 5:15 I was in the Farmington McDonald’s sipping coffee, reading my email, writing a blog item and eavesdropping on four Republican geezers saying kind things about Sarah Palin that would offend and frighten most of my ex-colleagues in journalism.
Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley' Page 9